Friday, November 21, 2008

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.

Rightly or wrongly, I stopped looking at my blog stats well over a year ago. That way neurosis lies. But, via my RSS reader, I am informed of how many of you kindly subscribe using that tool.

Overnight, not having blogged in two days, I lost three subscribers and that got me thinking. Had I (or Loren Feldman) offended readers with my Motrin post, had I bored them into submission, had they just lost the blog-reading habit or had readers switched to another RSS system? I have no way of knowing.

And it's important to know why people don't want what you're offering. Not because you should shape it to every person's whim, but because it's as informative to understand people's aversion to your product/service as it is to understand their loyalty. Motrin's biggest failing was not being ready to deal with that aversion and thus not engaging with it.

Keeping your current customers happy is a crucial business skill, but your new customers (and thus growth) are people who don't yet use your product/service and who just might share the views of those who are leaving you. Do you bother to find out what those views might be?

3 Comments:

Sacrifice is sometimes the most liberating attitude you can have in business - as long as you sacrifice the one's who ultimately have little longterm value to your brand. If I was Motrin, I'd of done follow up ads saying "fuck off you trendy-wendy wannabe uber Mum's with a nasty line in bullying' but I'm not so I just will vent as yet another company displays all the backbone of your typical mainstream ad agency account director.